This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Elephants shape the African savanna. They consume huge amounts of forage, dig for water, topple trees and affect all the animals around them.
So, what happens to their outsized presence after these iconic animals pass away? That's the question posed by an international team of researchers who studied the sites of elephant carcasses in South Africa's Kruger National Park. The scientists documented soil chemistry, microbiology, biodiversity and animal grazing around elephant remains.
They discovered that decomposition creates nutrient hotspots that can persist on the landscape for years, possibly decades. This flush of nutrients fuels microbial activity and plant vigor, which attracts herbivores to the site long after the visual signs of the elephant have disappeared. Ironically, this same cascade that energizes plants and soil microbes reduces their diversity.
"We know that these really charismatic megafauna have strong impacts on ecosystems while they're alive, but until now we haven't really understood how those impacts continue after they die," said former UC Santa Barbara postdoc Courtney Reed, lead author of the paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2009, one of Kruger National Park's great tuskers—a large, lone bull elephant called Alexander—died of natural causes. His body lay just off one of the main roads that senior author Dave Thompson frequently traveled on for another project.
"Watching the decomposition of that carcass over just a couple of months got me curious," recalled Thompson, a biodiversity scientist at the South African Environmental Observation Network. He shared his observations with his colleague, UC Santa Barbara's Deron Burkepile, and the two gradually developed ideas and hypotheses about the carcass's effect on the soil, possible knock-on effects across the food web and how these might change over the years. Early explorations quickly revealed how dynamic these carcass sites are.
Soon the pair were enlisting the help of Kruger's rangers to find sites and applying for grants to study the phenomenon in earnest. When a large animal dies, it immediately alters the spot where it falls. "At first, the elephant carcass just wipes out all the biomass at the center," said Reed, now at Princeton, "leaving these huge bare spots." The animal's immense size flattens vegetation, and the activity from throngs of scavengers scrapes the surrounding ground bare.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
